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Just Johnny
Johnny Feng was promised it all: chauffeur, personal chef to prepare real, organic food, endless electronic toys, the best education, vacations on white-sand beaches surrounded by well-sculpted boys and girls wearing more tan than clothing, even a personal jet. As the sole heir to one of Hong Kong’s leading transshipment private companies, Johnny had his destiny laid out before him even before he was born: a life of extravagant leisure tempered only by the discipline needed to develop a future leader. Raised at private schools in the UK, by adolescence Johnny had already spent most of his life under the careful watch of the best tutors and wardens money can buy, a trend unchanged by his enrolment at Oxford. It was as a senior BBA student at Oxford that Johnny met Athelmund Queldryk, a somewhat quirky and very flamboyant young fellow student. Despite, or perhaps because of, their vast differences in background—the bohemian Queldryk was studying magic on bursary—the two quickly fell deeply in love, and, far from the gaze of Johnny’s conservative parents, were married two years later. However, Johnny’s boundless prospects took a catastrophic turn downwards shortly before he finished his first postgraduate degree (MBA), with the hostile acquisition of the family company by the Wuxing corporation. Wuxing’s narrow corporate ladder had no place for newcomers on its upper rungs, and so the Fengs took a fall, dragging down young Johnny’s fortunes with them. Feng Cheng’s health didn’t survive the plummet, and his wife followed him into the grave within a few months, leaving Johnny parentless and dependent on Wuxing’s need for qualified and unthreatening recruits for his future. With only a fraction of his family’s wealth remaining to him, Johnny finished his schooling after a suitable break to mourn his parents, and went to work for the Wuxing corporation, albeit at a much lower rank than once appeared his due. Rather than the vice-presidency he might have earlier reasonably expected, Johnny instead was assigned to lead a small team rolling-out increased matrix security in Seattle in anticipation of Wuxing’s need for expansion there. Not long after he began his tenure in Seattle, with a somewhat culturally shell-shocked Queldryk in tow, Johnny’s ambitions hit another rather large road bump. Perhaps his Westernized mode of constructive criticism drew the ire of one of his more traditionally-minded elder colleagues, perhaps his bold intelligence ruffled the nest of a politically-entrenched corporate superior, or perhaps a higher-up heard about Johnny’s family history and got the idea that Johnny wasn’t the malleable puppet that the company required. Whatever the case, only six months after beginning his new career, it was all over at Wuxing for Johnny. He returned home to his posh company-paid condo one day to find his access codes revoked, and Queldryk waiting sullenly in the courtyard with a few meagre possessions. After a sleepless night in his luxury van—luckily, one of the last perks from the inheritance, rather than a company car—Johnny walked into The Dirty Jack, a bar of ill-repute known to the hacking community as a contact point for illegal work, determined to get back on his feet, as a first step in getting back on the corporate ladder, and getting back at whoever had pushed him off of it.